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Some people just naturally need more or less sleep than others,
but it is quite possible to adjust to a lengthy period of mild sleep deprivation.
Once you've adjusted, your body tends to stay that way, and you have to work
on adjusting back to a normal sleep pattern.
Of course, reactions also vary from person to person, so YMMV.

I had two lengthy periods of mild sleep deprivation - the first was
a period of about a year where obligations afforded me about four hours
a day to sleep. The second was a little m

Power napping is my preferred way to do this as well. I've found that I'm pretty good at falling asleep quickly and napping for ~20 minutes. It's a huge recharge. I think I read (or heard) somewhere that Thomas Edison was a power napper.

I totally agree with people needing more/less sleep than others -- my wife is on the 'needs more' side of that. She really needs at least 7.5 - 8 hours per night, and it immediately affects her if she doesn't.

It's difficult to survive any sort of shift or watch work
without power napping, but you can't survive long term on it.
Studies - no, I've no idea what studies - show that the body
eventually needs the REM sleep that power napping doesn't provide
in order to repair and restore itself.

It's all a function of what you're doing to your body, and what your body is doing to you. I hear the occasional story about some over-achiever who is operating at superhuman performance at less than 4 hours per night. Being properly nourished is apparently a significant part of it.

Buckminster Fuller had a trick where he got only 2 hours sleep a day, but did it in 15 minute increments. Part of it was knowing exactly when he needed his fifteen minute naps. Part of it was eating the optimum diet of stea

...of sleep deprivation, depending on who you read and what study you believe, can include anything from mild irritability (as described), a range of hallucinations, and (in extreme cases) coma and death.

I also seem to remember there being a record-holder for Least Amount Of Sleep Needed Per Night, but I can't remember the name or amount of time.

The real way to do it is Polyphasic sleep. 15 minutes of sleep every four hours. If I do the math right, that's 22.5 hours awake every day. Astounding.

I heard about this years ago, a friend had a copy of some medical journal where it talked about polyphasic sleep. Apparently it's excruciatingly hard to get on the system, but once people did, they got higher average scores on cognition and recall tests.

It makes sense. It's how animals sleep. Just watch a cat or dog. It's how babies sleep. I believe it was

Parents go through this with their newborns. We had four months of getting no more than 2 hours uninterrupted sleep with William. I've found that even when he started sleeping all night, we still wake up around 4, even though we didn't before we had him.

Parents adjust. It's amazing how functional you can be with broken sleep. It's also amazing how dysfunctional you can be. Like Whammo said, don't expect to be 100% even if you're used to it. There's a big difference between subsistence sleeping and c